Saturday, November 28, 2009

More Colvin emails

The Globe and Mail's Christie Blatchford, an unabashed supporter of the Afghanistan mission, has supposedly got her hands on the secret memos of Richard Colvin--and to hear her tell it, they don't reveal very much of anything.

With these e-mails now, finally, in the public domain, albeit in a redacted form, Canadians may have more information but they know less.

In condemning with the same brush highly professional Canadian soldiers, and to complain that they were complicit in breaches of the law of armed conflict and knowingly buried his reports, it is Mr. Colvin who has some explaining left to do.

The twenty-four-hour rule should apply.

But at this point I smell a rat. How do we know that the Globe has the complete set of emails? (In fact there is some evidence that it does not.) And if this is indeed all that they contained, why the strenuous, grunting exertions of the Harper government over this past many months, including a gag on Colvin himself, to keep them secret in the first place?

The comment thread is worth a read. Some commenters, in fact, appear to have their BS-meter switched on and registering high. But let's wait and see.